By Seung Min Kim May 15 at 5:25 PM [link:seungmin.kim@washpost.com|Email the author]

For six days straight, Republican senators had publicly rallied to the defense of their longtime colleague battling cancer, Sen. John McCain, who was the target of a crass joke by a White House aide calling him irrelevant because “he's dying anyway.” ... But in a long luncheon Tuesday with President Trump himself, none of the Senate Republicans in attendance brought up the ­McCain smear — or the steadfast refusal by Trump and the White House to apologize for it.

“I’ve said how I feel about the comment about Senator McCain. It was unconscionable. I think everybody involved should apologize,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) as he exited the lunch held at the U.S. Capitol. “But this was a policy meeting, right? It was policy-driven.” ... Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has had his own personal spats with Trump, added: “That’s not what we do in those meetings.”

The episode illustrated how reluctant most Republicans have become about directly challenging Trump, whose approval numbers have ticked up recently amid encouraging economic signs and a scheduled summit with North Korea. Trump is also viewed as a critical asset as the GOP seeks to retain House and Senate majorities in November.
....

Seung Min Kim is a White House reporter for The Washington Post, covering the Trump administration through the lens of Capitol Hill. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, she spent more than eight years at Politico, primarily covering the Senate and immigration policy. Follow @seungminkim